Internet Marketing Mistake #4 You Suffer From The “If I Build It, They Will Come” Delusion

This is the third installment in my series “Top 20 Mistakes Small Businesses Make with Their Websites.”

Online Marketing Mistake #4. You Suffer From The “If I Build It, They Will Come” Delusion

Many business owners become victims of the completely unfounded and bizarre – if you know anything about online marketing – belief, that customers will miraculously flock to their website once they have it designed and published. So they spend all they money and efforts on design, usability, navigation, latest and coolest features, and stuff. They hire a designer to create a beautiful graphics, and a writer to polish every page of text for the site. They agonize over every little detail on every page.

Don’t get me wrong, all these things are very important, but if you *only* do these things – you’ll be missing some important elements of the puzzle.

Are you missing an important piece of the puzzle?

The harsh reality of internet marketing is this: it’s ***NOT ENOUGH*** to just build it.

After all, what’s the use of even the most beautiful website, if no one even knows that it exists?

And yet I hear it all the time – when I offer my services to business owners – many of them still think in terms of building a web page. They reply “Oh, no thanks, I already have a website” or “I just want a brochure-type of site”.

What you need to do is: build it, OPTIMIZE it, PROMOTE it, and then they will come.

You need to spend at least as much time, effort, and money on marketing and promotion of your website.

Once you’ve built your website you have to optimize it for the search engines, so they can direct to you people searching for the exact products and services that you offer.

You need to promote it by posting content on other sites: article marketing sites, PR sites, video sites (Youtube is huge at the moment). But don’t make it all about you. Write and talk about topics that interest people in your niche. Offer helpful advice and tips. Participate in discussions on forums and related blogs.

You also need to tell people about it. Include your web address on your stationery, business cards, brochures, and email signatures. Create social media profiles for your business: Facebook and Twitter are huge, but don’t limit yourself to those two. Go where your audience is. Create a blog and start a conversation with your audience.

Think of your website the same way you’d think of a box of marketing brochures: if you don’t get them into the hands of people, no one will read them. They will be useless and the money and effort spent on creating them will go to waste.

You need to be proactive in building content, optimizing for search engines, building links and collecting visitors’ email addresses from day one, so that you can lure people back to your website time and time again. If that sounds like it’s a lot of work, you are right, it is. But it’s totally worth the effort if you want to build a successful online presence for yourself or your business.